In the living room of their seventh-floor apartment, Stephen Vos and Jackie Eastman kick back on the couch and call up Netflix on their tablet. They’re getting married in a few months—a New Year’s wedding—and the coffee table is littered with seating charts, a DJ playlist, catering requests. They’re sick of arguing over where to seat pervy Uncle Milton and whether they should order flower centerpieces for every table, so they take a break. A bottle of red, a scary movie on Netflix, and then—maybe, probably, since they can’t seem to get enough of each other these days—they’ll peel off each other’s clothes. But something happens when Stephen logs in. The screen streams red. At first they believe it’s some glitch—some pixelated version of the Netflix home screen—and then their mouths go slack, and they stand from the couch and walk into the kitchen and slide steak knives from the drawer and methodically work their way from apartment to apartment. Everyone opens their door with a bowl of candy and a smile that doesn’t last.
At the Portland International Airport, people cluster before the monitors for arrivals, departures, baggage claim, all of the screens streaming red. A backpack sags to the floor. Then a purse. A satchel. Nothing matters anymore—not their pills or their money or their passports—because who they are has been flouted, hacked, raped. A Starbucks barista hurls scalding water into the face of a customer waiting for an Americano. A girl with pigtails bites the neck of a man snoozing on a bench. A Port Authority policeman unholsters his pistol and opens fire on a group of passengers lined up to board their flight. While out on the tarmac, a jet rolls suddenly off course and picks up speed as it bullets toward the airport. The atrium is like a glass cathedral, high-ceilinged and busy with potted plants and padded chairs. People flip through novels and gulp bottled water and poke at their phones. They don’t see the jet coming, but when it noses through the vast window, they all stand suddenly. The fuselage sends up a wave of sparks and the tile buckles. Thousands of shards of glass sparkle the air and skitter the floor and jaggedly pierce skin. One man looks like a plate-backed dinosaur from the glass stabbing his spine. Another is blinded with two icicle-sized slivers jutting from his eyes. “Help,” people cry. “Help!” But no one answers. There is only more screaming, a different threat in every direction.
There are no stars over Portland. There never are. The light pollution is too severe, thrown by the millions of streetlamps, headlights, stadium lights, porch lights, storefronts that glow even when closed. No one ever looks up anymore and feels awed and dwarfed by the infinite, aware only of the globe of light they are trapped in, where the only star is the red star of the Texaco station.
The moths are out, battering the overhead fluorescents at the gas island. A man with a black goatee and a pitchfork tattoo on his forearm moves among the pumps, filling tanks with unleaded, super unleaded, diesel, running credit cards, handing back receipts, saying, “Have a good one, have a good one.”
Halloween, he deals with a lot of drunks, like this white Jeep Grand Cherokee that pulls up, the windows down, the stereo blasting hip-hop. Four white boys, late teens, early twenties, with gelled hair, polo shirts with the collars popped, their faces painted to look like skeletons. Probably from Lake Oswego, downtown to hit the bars. The driver—a pouty-faced kid with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth—kills the engine and the stereo dies.
“Fill it?” the attendant asks, and the driver says, “Yeah, with super.” Smoke and beer in his breath. He fumbles with his wallet, hands over a black AmEx.
The attendant doesn’t see many of these, and he taps it in his palm a moment before running the card, twisting off the cap, nosing the nozzle into the tank. The line shudders with fuel, and the numbers start to twirl.
Then the stereo starts up again, blasting so loudly, it hurts. His marrow shudders. His ears feel ready to burst and bleed. There are two other cars getting fueled up, and a few people walking in and out of the store. All of them are staring with annoyance at the white Jeep.
“You mind turning that down?” the attendant says, and the skeleton says, “Actually, I do.” He blows a cloud of smoke and cranks the knob higher. The attendant shakes his head and walks away to check on another vehicle, and the driver and his friends laugh, give each other knuckles, nod along to the thumping bass.
“Check out this guy,” one of the skeletons says, nodding at the figure lurching down the sidewalk, toward the station. About a block away, he appears in the pool of a streetlamp, then disappears in shadow, then flashes into existence again, getting closer, closer. He has a tromping gait, stooping forward, his arms dangling at his sides. He’s a heavy guy, his big body crushed into a rabbit costume splashed with what looks like blood. “What do you think? Psycho Killer Easter Bunny?”
The man seems intent on his destination, staring straight ahead and driving his floppy feet down forcefully—until the driver leans out the window and calls out to him. “Hey, fattie—I’m pretty sure I know where you hid all the chocolate eggs!”
The man in the rabbit costume stops and slowly swivels his head toward them. The ears make his shadow appear horned. He starts toward them, and the skeletons in the Jeep giggle nervously. “Oh shit, this guy is messed up,” they say. “Roll up the windows, Todd.”
Todd, the driver, fumbles with the keys, and they clatter to the floor. He doesn’t bother going after them, because the man in the rabbit costume is already here, only a few feet away from his open window, studying him with a dead expression. His eyes appear red-laced. What must be fake blood mats his costume and speckles his blank face.
“What the hell happened to you, bro? Get off on the wrong holiday?” Todd smiles, sucks hard on his cigarette, flicks the ash, blows some smoke that swirls around the man in the rabbit costume before ghosting away. “You kill Santa Claus or what?”
More giggles from the backseat. The music thumps like an angry heartbeat between them.
At that moment the gas tank fills and the pump chunks off and the man in the rabbit costume’s attention turns away from Todd. He walks to the rear of the Jeep, reaching for the nozzle.
“Put up the windows, Todd—put up the windows!”
Todd ducks down for the keys, fumbling around, hooking the ring with his finger. He tries mashing them into the ignition, but it’s too late. The man in the rabbit costume rips the nozzle from the tank and clicks the trigger and restarts the pump. Gas splatters the ground, then the rear of the vehicle. He holds out his arm as if firing a pistol, splashing their faces. They shield their eyes with their hands and sputter, “Oh shit, shit, shit!”
Then the man in the rabbit costume trains the hose on the front seat, at Todd’s face, at the red tip of his cigarette. The gas ignites with the thump of a dropped crate, of misplaced air. It goes blue first, like pooling water, and then brightens to a blinding orange. The boys are screaming, their skin melting off them.
Their screams and the music give way to an earsplitting boom as the Jeep explodes, leaping up and forward to crunch its grille into the pavement. And then the pumps explode, one after the other, hurling sheets of metal. And then the underground tanks erupt, the pavement buckling and crackling to make room for the volcanic spurt of flame that will shatter windows and melt the Texaco star from its sign.